¶ 3Leave a comment on paragraph 30
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¶ 4Leave a comment on paragraph 40
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There is some material on tuition — I think it’s at the end of the “Reasons to Mistrust” chapter? — anyway it’s difficult to get that information because supposedly inexpensive EU institutions charge a lot for non-EU students, but those fees are meliorated by grants, etc. The best I’ve been able to do is estimate.

“How to determine if the studio practice is at PhD level?” is not a different question from “Is this faculty member tenurable?” The answer is either criteria-based assessment (hello, audit culture) or peer-review (“I’d never want to be a member of a club that accepted me as a member…”).

It is crucial to point out that North American PhDs in the end are examined by the Committee who has been advising the candidate all along. There is a public defense, but the final decision is by the Committee established at the beginning of the research. Elsewhere, PhDs are examined externally.

An important point: part of the infrastructure established at RMIT, one of the leaders in practice-based (design) research, was what was known as the GRC – Graduate Research Conference (it is now called something different). Every 6 months, every candidate, no matter where he or she was in their candidacy was required to present on their progress before their peers and a panel of experts external to their supervision. This meant that everyone involved – candidates, prospective candidates, supervisors, externals – was exposed to the collective process of evaluating practice-based research. The intense weekend events were a combination of boot-strapping and quality assurance, with benchmarking possible between different disciplines (landscape, architecture, fashion, visual communication, etc) and between different stages of the process (seeing a candidate’s first progress review vs a candidate’s ‘penultimate’ review, prior to submitting for examination). The weekend was bookended by public defenses on the Friday and Monday. As a result, I believe that RMIT would strongly push back on your claim that ‘no one knows how to assess the (practice-based) PhD.’

The GRCs I attended were the richest aspects of my academic career to date and I miss them so much that I am now determined to establish the ritual as part of practice-based design PhDs at CMU (having failed to get up design PhDs at Parsons).

In design, there is a significant body of literature building on Hubert Dreyfus’ Heideggerian/Merleau-Pontian account of expertise development. The argument provides a useful (and I believe phenomenologically accurate) explanation for the role of the dialectic of self-consciousness/incorporation. In short, it is not that mastery = less self-consciousness, but rather pattern-based metaconceptual capacities.

The larger context here could be the attempt to recover phronesis (the ‘art’ of judgement?) from the dominance of techne.

I’m not understanding this point. This seems to me precisely a reason to advocate strongly for practice-based PhDs, so that practitioners can teach studies subjects and not just studios.

The problem with the MFA as a terminal degree is that it is very rare for an MFA to include a course on ‘teaching studio-based art (or design),’ or have the kind of qualifying exams that North American PhDs have to accredit the graduate as being capable of teaching (along with some process of being mentored into teaching via TAs, etc – though this often ends up being, exploited to teach junior level courses with no instruction/support). As a result, the great black box that is studio (apart from your investigations, James, I must say) is perpetuated. The only qualification needed to teach a studio is to have suffered in one. (See http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1162/104648800564608#preview )